Linux Hacked Onto Fry's Cheap Wireless G Router

nerdyH points to this smile-inducing story at LinuxDevices which begins "An inexpensive house-brand 802.11b/g wireless router from Fry's (Outpost.com) has been adopted by a group of Linux hackers that aims to make Fry's 'AirLink' devices 'as capable as name-brand gadgets.' The AirLink101 AR315W is based on a Marvell board that can run Linux or eCos, and has a six-port 10/100 Ethernet switch built in. It's listed for $45 online, but is reportedly on sale for $20 in some Fry's stores."

Comments

Good for them!

[Saint Aardvark]

Congratulations to these guys -- this is very cool. As TFA sez, a $20 embedded Linux box is Just A Good Thing; the flexibility that'll come with getting Linux (or NetBSD or whatever) working on these things will be amazing. I'm also glad to see that these guys are active -- the HRI people, who have a very similar project, seem to have fallen off the face of the earth. (Where are you guys?)

I've been working on something similar: last Christmas, I picked up 3 Network Everywhere NWR04B wireless routers on sale -- $18 each! -- and have been trying ever since to duplicate this guy's success in getting uClinux (a version of Linux for CPUs with no MMU) running on the thing.

The guy who got it running originally hasn't responded to my emails, so it's a good thing he made his kernel tree available. Alsoplus, I think he used a JTAG adapter to load the image; since I wanted to make a firmware image that anyone could upload with the web interface, I had to reverse engineer the firmware checksum too. (Luckily it was a pretty simple checksum, or else I don't think I would've been able to do it...I'm really learning all this as I go along.)

In July I finally managed to get a kernel panic, am now trying to get BusyBox working on the thing. I keep getting these errors:

Unhandled fault: external abort on linefetch (D4) at 0x00000001
fault-common.c(97): start_code=0x740040, start_stack=0x71ffbc)

which, from what I have been able to Google, may be because of differing opinions (libc/uClibc vs. the kernel vs. the chip) about whether or not this thing has an FPU. If anyone's got any suggestions, please leave a note -- I need all the help I can get.

It's been an incredible learning experience -- I know more now about how the kernel interacts with CPUs, the filesystems, compilers and the bootloader than I ever had. (Still got tons to learn, mind you.) I'm looking forward to the day I can get a Beowulf cluster of these things going. :-)

Re:"AirLink" products

[The Spoonman]

For example, HyperWRT has managed to find the setting on a WRT54G to double the output power. You can also modify the hardware to add an LCD display, two serial ports (to use as console, our you could connect a modem and setup a backup PPP dial-up connection in case of broadband outage) and a smart card slot. For $69 I got a small Linux box to play with, with working wireless, and a 200Mhz processor.

I want an under-$40 linux device with VGA and USB

[davidwr]

Instant dirt-cheap thin client - USB can handle the networking, keyboard, and mouse, VGA gives you a screen.

Can you say ThinStation? I knew you could.

Re:jeez --- why NOT

[anagama]

It's these hardware hackers who make it possible to not only run linux on various hardware, but to run various bits of hardware with linux systems. For example, without hardware hackers, I could never have uploaded songs to my Creative Nomad II or used my Handspring from my linux system. We should be happy that there are people who have the ability to make linux run on random stuff, or who can get random stuff to work with linux. It makes my life better and I have a lot of respect and appreciation for those who can do this. These guys deserve our praise, not sneers.

Or maybe the sneers come from the windows slashdotters. Could be wrong, but I'd think most linux users would see the value and appreciate the skills and experience that these hackers are building.

Fry's

[DavidD_CA]

Before everyone rushes out to Fry's with their $20.... I feel compelled to share my best friend's Fry's story.

He went there to purchase a hard drive and was sold a brand new drive in original packaging with at a new price.

When he got it home, he installed it ready to format, and lo-and-behold it booted up into Windows!

After some mild snooping, he found Quickbooks files and other documents from the former owner. Being a good person, he found the guy's phone number (among other things) and learned that the guy bought the hard drive about three weeks prior and returned it because it had some bad sectors on it. They assured him that they would destroy it.

Why don't they let you in to the OS more often

[team99parody]

Seems LinkSys would have an even huger following if they actively encouraged people to ssh to the box and allow people to customize it.

Regarding the fear of customer support issues, all they'd really need is a ROM of a stable release and a reset-switch that would re-load the flash from the fixed ROM.

I'd definately buy a wireless router that gives me more flexibility of routing & firewalling than the default GUIs offer.

Any reason why LinkSys (and airlink, and Tivo, etc) don't just openly publish their APIs and how to connect?